Is this potato fruit ripe?

[chris]

I'd like to try my hand at growing some of my spud fruit... I've had it on the kitchen windowsil for about a month odd now, it's slowly turning darker... is this ripe yet?



Of the unripe fruit that I broke open to have a look there were seeds in there so I'm hoping for seeds in these so I can follow on from Duronals (sp?) experiement thread

[Flummery]

They look ok to me. I let mine go black before I opened them. I swished them around in a little water and then seived them and let them dry on a saucer.

I now have 2 varieties of my own potatoes.

[quark1]

They look fine to me - do as Flummery suggested - and see what you get next year. It'll be a bit of a lottery and it may be wise to keep the seeds from each fruit quite separate as the results could well vary.

I distributed Salad Blues a couple of years back and this is possible now one of Flum's new varieties - I think she's dubbed it Amethyst - or similar.

[chris]

Well, unless there's other spud growers very near me and assuming spuds can't cross with some other veg/tuber then I should have a mix of:

Rooster (these were harvested from a rooster plant)
Rocket
Charlotte
Maris Piper

So we'll see I guess!

Thanks, i'll sort them out tonight and store them away then for sowing later on!

[Flummery]

They look fine to me - do as Flummery suggested - and see what you get next year. It'll be a bit of a lottery and it may be wise to keep the seeds from each fruit quite separate as the results could well vary.

I distributed Salad Blues a couple of years back and this is possible now one of Flum's new varieties - I think she's dubbed it Amethyst - or similar.

I have two from your Salad Blue - Amethyst and Purple Heart. The latter is rosy coloured when lifted but cooke pale with a purple centre. It's been a really worthwhile project.

[Snadger]

I left mine a bit longer until they went an opaque creamy colour, but before they started to shrivel!

[chris]

Hmm... I've been thinking about this quite a bit. Am I wrong in thinking heritage seeds are open polinated? Am I then also wrong in thinking that these seeds would not be true, as could easily be crossed with whatever other varieties are near by?

How are pure strains kept so pure? Are the flowers kept covered so no insects can get to them? How's that possible? I'd have thought that due to this pure strains would be more expensive than f1s? But it seems to be the other way around (I know there's a lot of work gone into the developing of strains and time etc but surely an equal amount of work must go into keeping pure strains pure?).

[Flummery]

Potatoes are different in that they are polyploid and you will get a different variety with every seed you sow, whetehr they havce crossed or not. To keep potato strains pure you need to use a 'seed potato' - in other words you keep a tuber from year to year, so you are actually growing clones. That's what we normally do.